[dot] Second Osnabrueck Meeting Boosts PIM Development

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1073950883/

From: Daniel Molkentin <molkentin at kde.org>
Dept: osnabrueck-the-epicenter-of-western
Date: Tuesday 13/Jan/2004, @00:41

Second Osnabrueck Meeting Boosts PIM Development
================================================

   Last year [http://dot.kde.org/1043346607/] in January, Intevation
[http://www.intevation.de] invited the KDE PIM team to
[http://pim.kde.org] a meeting for a hackfest to their offices at
Osnabrueck [http://www.osnabrueck.de]. This was such a great success,
that everyone was glad Intevation invited the PIM team a second time
exactly one year later to polish and fix up Kontact and its components
for the upcoming KDE 3.2 release. Last year
[http://pim.kde.org/development/meetings/20030103/group.php] the big
decision was to make KolabClient the successor to Kontact. This year
[http://pim.kde.org/development/meetings/20040102/group.php] the plan
was to make a a roadmap for future KDE-PIM Development
[http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kdepim-3.3-release-plan.html].
The developers took the opportunity to discuss complicated issues in
detail and sit together for brainstorming or in order to fight evil
bugs.

 Meanwhile, Cies Breijs revamped the Kontact homepage
[http://www.kontact.org]. It's now back with a new design and more
content and will be updated more frequently now. Thanks a lot Cies!
Other thanks are due to Bernhard Reiter and Jan-Oliver Wagner and the
rest of the Invevation  staff for hosting the meeting.
     Kontact [http://www.kontact.org] most of all has seen a lot of
polishing to make sure it shines in its initial release. Several bugs
have been tackled, KNode is now a true Kontact part, Kontact replaces
all PIM applications seamlessly when running. Furthermore work has been
put into speed improvements with ICal and IMAP and stability. GUI
consistency fixes were not, of course, forgotten.
     In order to be able to commit new features and ideas that arose
during the meeting, osnabueck_branch was created. This branch will be
merged back to to main development line ("HEAD") after the freeze for
3.2 is over. Improvements in this branch include the port of many config
dialogs to KConfigXT and KCModules to allow for a smoother integration
of config options in the next version of Kontact. KPilot integrates into
Kontact and wishlist items have been implemented. For those interested
in details, the developers summed up
[http://pim.kde.org/development/meetings/20040102/individual.php] their
activities during the meeting.
     The developers decided on a seperate release for the KDE PIM
applications. Cornelius Schumacher of KOrganizer
[http://pim.kde.org/components/korganizer.php] and KitchenSync fame will
act as release coordinator for KDE PIM 3.3. The developers agreed on a
set of features (HTML composing, KitchenSync integration, Kolab and
eGroupware Integration and Client-side IMAP filtering) as well as on a
release schedule
[http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kdepim-3.3-release-plan.html].
Of course, features not listed on the release plan can also be added if
they are mature enough.
     To speed up compiling, Stephan Kulow and Michael Matz from SuSE
[http://www.suse.com] generously provided an early version of icecream
[http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdenonbeta/icecream/icecream/README?rev=1.2&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup],
a distcc-based [http://distcc.samba.org] tool for centralized
distributed compiling which proved to be really helpful.
     The KDE PIM Team will meet again in March at the Chemnitzer
Linux-Tag 2004 [http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/linux/tag] for a meeting with
developers of groupware server projects to discuss and implement Kontact
integration to enable you to make Kontact the best-connected groupware
client available!